Monsters: An Anthology

I’ve been busy behind the scenes but at long last, news!! Firstly, I have a new piece on the Wizards of the Coast site (it’ll be up in a few hours; I’ll update the link when it’s available).

Secondly, I drew the cover to the Couscous Collective anthology MONSTERS (see above image). This was a really fun piece to draw. Lovecraft fans will recognize night-gaunts on the left side of the picture; the whole piece was actually inspired by the Lovecraftian/Dunsanian tabletop RPG I’m working on, DREAMLAND. One of the ideas of the setting is that most animals are just as arcane, deep down, as conventional mythical monsters: the humble cat, bat and bird have secrets and powers as strange as the dragon or the hippogriff. (After all, in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” cats end up being one of the major forces in the story.) The alliances and intrigues of the beasts is one of the wild cards in the ever-shifting world of Dreamland.

In other news, I’m having a sale on Walkthrough Map Prints: from now until December 5, my collection of 7 D&D classic adventures as walkthrough maps is $25 off! Get a set for your RPG-loving friends and help me clear out my warehouse! I’ve got to make room for more *new* D&D adventure maps, which is actually the very next thing I’ll be drawing right after I make this post…

Snakes but not Nagas. Bats and birds and cats and other animals including a night-gaunt and a gryphon. Interesting mix of beasts. But who is the non-human girl. Is she related to the satyrical Lengites?

Nagas aren’t snakes because they have eyelids, and can reason and talk and can create material objects and structures. Not related to the Valusians though.

Jason
January 8, 2016 at 11:20 pm
@Night-Gaunt49 – The humanoid figure is a fairy, which is a category of creatures that are neither Human nor Abhuman… but it’s hard to explain in greater detail…
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What I would call a humanoid non-human.

@Night-Gaunt49 — Spoiler: I took the name “abhumans” from William Hope Hodgson’s “The Night Land.” Although the Latin root “ab” suggests they somehow come *from* humans (presumably descended from them through evolution or mutation, in the case of The Night Land), which actually isn’t the case in Dreamland. But it sounds good, and The Night Land abhumans have the appropriate feeling of threat…

Jason Thompson, I had run across that designation, “abhuman” before from other stories though am not sure which I had first read and came across it.

There are creatures who look modestly human yet are without any human biological contact.

One example is Zar from the Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea episode 1.20 called “The Invaders” with the great Robert Duvall before he hit it big in the movies. I found the premise so Lovcraftian that I am in the process of novelizing the story and expanding on it. I consider his kind to be made by the Qnx ‘c’ nx or Star-Headed Old Ones of “At The Mountains of Madness” and Zar tells the crew he, and the others, “were manufactured by our scientists…” and is 20 million years old. A look inside his body shows such a radical difference he is in no way human, yet the Old Ones had somehow anticipated the humanoid form to appear later in “another evolutionary cycle” and created this legacy species to inherit the Earth after they went into their “Sunless Sea” last habitat. At a critical time during the Thermal Maximum Zar’s people made two choices. One to go into space and settle on some other world while the remainder when into stasis capsules until the climate was better habitable again. Unfortunately themselves and their mega-city sank. It was the SSRN Seaview noting such seismic instability attracted them to very area they found the submerged city and the silvery capsules full of such non-human humanoids and brought just one of the capsules aboard. That was almost the destruction of them all too. I posit that beyond a certain point as species representative of a single member could cause a lower developed species like Humans a very bad time.l

As you can see I have had time to work on it and found an easy integration with the Mythos You can see the full episode on the Internet. Duvall gives a fine performance of a being of immense but alien intelligence brought to the future (1972) the episode ran in 1964 and is in black and white. It would have made a good first season Outer Limits very easily. (Duvall appeared in three episodes of OL himself.)